Well, the brutal, climactic final pages are Bloodkiss – Part One are now online for your viewing pleasure… I hope you enjoy it!

So my experiments on the battle between Damage Bonus and Crit chance continue to bear fruit. Today I topped out at 328 dmg bonus, with 22% crit and landed a few 2500s with PA, targets being a WH, WL, and BW (the one in the SS).

I still have no idea what the “328″ number literally means, clearly it’s not simply being added to the base tooltip amount; and it can’t be completely factored in because mousing over the tooltip dmg for PA, then doubling it, is still nowhere near 2500. So I’m not really sure how it works, but long story short I believe that increasing your dmg bonus say from 300 to 320, adds in fact more like 60-75 non-crit dmg to your attack, rather than just 20. It might be even more…

I’m not sure what to think about 22% crit as that seems quite low; but the giant crits sure are distracting. For those curious I am running now with 575 melee power broken down as follows:

92 from Tear of Sokth dagger (in mainhand), which is 18 + 74 tali
74 from Tear of Usurian dagger (in offhand, from tali… I’m still on the hunt for a second Sokth)
59 on Invader gloves, including tali
24 on Warlord boots
50 from liniment
158 from 3 TOVL glyphs
118 from the LOTD cape/ring set

** The armor I am wearing is 2 pieces Invader (shoulders and gloves), with 4 pieces Warlord (helm, chest, boots, belt)

For those who may be interested the subject of this particular test, Urmine, is a rr80 BW on Gorfang.

So I thought it would be interesting to show people what a busy rr77 Witch Elf’s backpack might look like. As you can see I’m drowning in pots and liniments, carry all manner of cutting instruments, and even a hodge podge of extra armor, DP, invader, and a few Warlord pieces as well as plenty of extra jewelry items and pocket/cape cooldown type stuffs.

Taransula is now donning 4 pieces of Sovereign armor, stacked with 3 invader, and as you can see I have my Onslaught Gem finally! This nets me 27% crit while still keeping my attack bonus near 280 and giving me tons of HP to work with. I’m hoping to get my shoulders soon, as they are one of the hottest looking pieces.

Going back to the backpack, the daggers you see are the Dreadkeeper Fang, 2x Bloodmoon daggers (one in offhand sporting wounds jewel, love it for the crit), Tear of Usirian, Tear of Sokth (mainhand), Marakrys- Frenzy of N’Kari, Blooddrinker of the Sandstrom, Kris of the Tormented, and Bloodfist Makhaira. Currently using Tear of Sokth for the insane attack speed, slotted with 37 str and 74 melee power.

As you can see from the chat log i am anti-recycling.

1.3.4 rings in a new age of glory for the Witch Elf class. Taste of Blood, meant from the beginning to help us in our role of “glass cannon dps” (and in my mind mitigate the lack of range and defense when compared to WH) which has been broken since beta, is now fixed.

And not only does it proc off everything (including dot ticks or absorbed hits), but it constantly refreshes itself and stacks with Flanking. This should give us the burst of MT + Flanking but much more consistently; assuming some upstart order dare attack you. The only place I could see MT being more useful is if you happen to run with an AMAZING premade and for some stupid reason order doesn’t focus your WE, in which case ToB won’t proc and you might prefer the more controllable dps of MT+Flanking out of stealth.

I assume ToB + MT + Flanking stacks also- but you’d have to drop BF and I don’t really recommend that… also you’d need to land an opener then get ToB to proc within 10s before MT wears off, seems a bit of a longshot.

All in all I’m very happy with my testing, and glad to see Mythic may be letting the WE take her hands off the wall. In fact WPs, IBs, and Slayers are getting some wee nerfs this patch as well; so perhaps the pendulum really is swinging back the other way. Altogether the ability to pick up ToB for free is going to save a lot of WE spec points, and make for new rash of frenzied beatdowns out there… I don’t know about you but I can’t wait

Zyth from Karak Norn has been kind enough to submit this incredible cover for a witch elf novel-in-pogress. Equal parts sexy and horror, the artist has definitely captured the true spirit of the Witch Elf here.

Yep, it’s finally happened to me I’ve become addicted to premades. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, one of my favorite things used to be hunting solo (which i still do a little bit… sometimes…), but as the nastiest WH on our server (Escher) said on the official boards, “it’s impossible to queue up solo anymore and be competitive.”

Well, my days of solo queuing are over and the difference is night and day. Very few deaths, extremely high dmg, kills, and RPs… my guild is farming the king every weekend, and there are several order guilds in the same boat, so I’m actually excited about the PvE again, which is kind of odd in and of itself…

So my spec has changed a bit to reflect my new status, and in so doing I made a nice discovery and will probably keep this spec until further notice. The LOTD Tears daggers (can be had from the tombs outside VL) are a godsend. People are selling Violent Myrmidon’s Soul (+37 str, 8hr), and “something’s” Sly Soul (+74 melee power) for a song on the AH. I once got a stack of 5 of the melee power talis for 16g. This gives me 63+37 str, and 92+74 melee power just on my weapons. I dropped BLB and Kiss of Doom, and picked up MT. I still have witchbrew. My attack bonus is parked at 295, crit at 24%, wounds at 695, and and my toughness (pulled a few points out) is at 209.

What happens is my average crit on AW is now in the 1700-1900 range, with extra squishies taking over 2k damage. Witchbrew regularly procs up to the 490s, and kisses to the 290s. Now, I’m running around with almost 400 melee power, but I do NOT have any glyphs from LOTD. Three of the glyphs will net me an additional +158 melee power and extra strength… At that point things will get pretty terrifying.

Therefore, I would encourage anyone, even if you have the blue versions of the Tears from LOTD merchants, to check out the prices on those 8 hour talis. Paying from 3-25g (depending on the market at the time) is far better than buying them with golden scarabs; and you’ll be amazed at the hit power increase. Most enemies will add from 10-25% to your crit rate; and if you are high enough rank to get your full crit bonus that’s even better reason to slot the sledge-hammer daggers and not worry about the loss of crit on them.

Masterful Treachery is great but I have found that unless you have a good premade I’d still consider it something of a waste- The scent of her perfume or whatever other dumb non-factor goes on still pulls my WE out of stealth constantly… But when it doesn’t, especially with 295 attack power, I’m finding I actually CAN kill that WH before the stun wears off, thus lowering the irritation meter that flashes red whenever I see Repel Blasphemy

So my little Alliance warband did well today I think, we got Karl to 21% which was really not bad for our first real crack at the king encounter. I also picked up my Sovereign Gloves today and dinged 76, so life is good. The funny thing about Gorfang I’m realizing is that both sides seem to spend an inordinate amount of time inside the other’s capital city. Pretty soon we’re going to have to start cleaning up after each other…

Yesterday in Altdorf I went in solo; I wasn’t intending on trying to get to Stage 2 so it didn’t matter. Well I ended up netting 54 kills (and 20 deaths lol), and 4% of my renown rank I also found a purple sorc staff which i sold on the AH for almost 400g, so the trip paid for itself!

So if I have anything constructive to leave you with here, it would be this: TOUGHNESS. I have almost 400 now (traded in my RPs) and I cannot believe the difference (it was a paltry 150-170 before). Now it’s true that the difference per hit is fairly small, but what I failed to realize when I dumped my points into it is that since I am constantly being attacked by more than one person (one of the perks of being a WE!) that those small differences can add up to a LOT of damage over a short period. The end result is that you have a few more seconds to think, press hotkeys, and burn your target. With my current gear I’m still running 266 Attack and 27% Crit so I’m really not giving up very much. Combine toughness with SR (the bubble waits for toughness mitigation before it protects you) and you may be surprised at how much longer you last

So this weekend I will be picking up my Warlord helm, which completes my set. The AP debuff, and 30 second cooldown bonus for Feinted Positioning are fantastic; and I will be running Swift Movements, Flanking, IP, and BF. What this means is that I am guaranteed 15% damage bonus ALL the time Feinted Positioning will have a 10s cooldown and a 10s duration. I will be able to ignore armor and stun from the front whenever I want, and with my current Warlord gear setup I will have a 10% chance to remove 50 AP, 7% to drain 45 AP, and 25% to drain 20 AP, on every hit.

This will hurt my strength/wounds stacking from sets; but constant Flanking bonus will go a long way to making up for that. It will be nice to relax and start collecting Royal crests… which will take forever, I’m in no hurry. Anyway, happy RvR’zing to everybody and now I have to get back to work

Taransula 3.0 inc!

Once upon a time I took upon myself to collect every graphical variety of chest armor for witch elf that exists in the world of Warhammer. What I came up with was 14 different varieties (including the Sovereign chest piece… which i took a SS of thanks to an NPC model). However, some months later a friend showed me a PQ from Blackfire Pass gave out a corset I had never seen as an influence reward.

I zipped out to the location and was disappointed to find I’d already completed the influence there when I was originally leveling up, and probably didn’t even pick the corset as a reward. Well, last night in Saphery I found a PQ that drops it in the blue bags (The Hard PQ just north of the flight master). So without further ado here are pics of that final corset, which most of you have probably never seen. Notice the back is as close to a thong as any WE armor is going to get

Ok, for those rr70+ witches out there I have something I think you should try… First the equipment: I’ve shuffled my gear around so I can triple set for the str bonus, which leaves me with only 22% crit in my current setup- but with a liniment that’s 27% and 715 wounds which is really not so bad.

My new spec is this

As you can see I’m taking only Witchbrew from Suffering… and was extremely pleased to find that with MT and Flanking stacked I often see kiss procs near 300 and Witchbrews of 500! Basically what this does is gives me my alpha strike potential back. My str is 1071 without liniments. Tactics I run are MT, BF, Flanking, IP.

I am thinking this might be one of our most efficient builds- KoB keeps my AP in good shape, and Witchbrew guarantees that bloodlust is never wasted. I have dropped BLB and Kiss of Doom here- but the heals were only really helpful in 1v1, I find that 25% proc is too slow in group situations to keep you up on its own. As for BLB I’m hitting healers so hard that I really don’t miss the debuff.

My secondary tactic set with this same build/gear is IP, Flanking, ToB, SR. This is my Me vs. Many setup. Bubble procs, +dmg procs, and Flanking still adding to Witchbrew/Kiss dmg really help me out here. With detaunts and LOTD goodies I was able to take out several 4v1s tonight in Altdorf…

Anyway, Happy New Year to everyone out there, and hopefully you aren’t as hungover today as I am… I really with I’d had a bigger dinner last night