FunCom Extra Life Campaign final results

Well folks, first and foremost, hats off to my wife Laura Roberts who worked 27 hours straight through on AoC to raise funds for the Extra Life 2012 campaign for children's hospitals charity. During that time she was able to raise $135 towards helping out with the Charity. This was great work and showed a lot of mental toughness and stamina to pull through the whole way. Originally it was supposed to be 24 hours but she got an early start so went the distance for 27 hours to make it to the finish line. Outstanding work from one of The Ghost Wolves!

Over all, participants from all FunCom games were a total of 211 people with the highest donation of over $460 USD. Total amount raised as of this time was well over $5,000. They were making a goal of $10,000 so maybe next year more will join in. The announcement came  a bit a go on The Voice of Crom for AoC players. With such short notice I think it was still a success and still helps some youngsters out. Perhaps next year we will see more activity on this subject.

This still speaks well of many community members who actually care about things beyond their own selfish concerns and it's a proud day to see any success. It is my hope that continued efforts will help band folks together for next year and the years to come.

Be looking for us next year, perhaps we will try to get more of our Ghostwolves involved into it and help those less fortunate than ourselves.

Extra Life 2012 Charity Drive for AoC

Hey folks,

Alot has been happening in the Ghostwolves. We have progressed throug all of W2 BRC and working on W3. Our raiding has been pretty constant so I've been busy as hell as a guild leader, sorry for the lack of posts. I will be discussing Patch 3.4 and my thoughts on the Bear Shaman which I have been very pleased with on the PvE side.

But on to my real topic here. Recently, my wife Laura who is also my co guild leader signed up for a charity game play marathon of 24 hours straight. This was to help obtain money for some children's hospitals across the nation. She is currently on hour 4 of 24 hours and we at the Ghostwolves are rooting for her success. I think it's important for the community to give back to others in need when possible, especially when it is for children in dire need of medical assistance. If you feel you would like to send a small donation (even $1.00 USD) to this worthy cause, know it is for youngsters who's family cannot always afford the medical care they need. Please support if you feel inclined, or even give a shout out in game to Pantherias of The Ghostwolves to keep her motivated to make it all the way through the entire 24 hours. Moral support if not monetary is a huge thing today and brings further awareness of what we are trying to help with. Thanks all!

Donations can be sent to the following link:

http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?...cipantID=37710

oh, make sure when you hit Donate button to search for Laura Roberts, that will take you to her donate point and you can send in whatever amount you desire!

Happy hunting out there in Hyboria especially with your seasonal quests!!!

3.3.8 Patch ToS revamp, Sprint Revamp and known issues

First the ToS (Tempest of Set) Revamp:

Some of our long time guild members that are big into the ToS started doing some number crunching to see if the General tree was even necessary to deal with. The changes on the main tree weren't that significant but it did take a little tweaking. Our main ToS had to do some experimenting on builds, but he is now ranging back up into 1800 DPS without having to deal with the general tree. There are still mana issues across the healing board since the patch. It's significant enough that all healers and possibly spell casters need to take a look at their feat trees. Our ToS has been able to hold spell weave indefinitely with his current build post patch.  He still has to watch his mana a little bit but over all pretty decent parses have been achieved.

The Sprint Revamp:
 Got to say I love how this has worked. I notice a bit higher usage of my stamina when dealing with melee in raids though. It's not so much as to be unmanageable, but still it needs a little more watching. Now, FC say all swift mounts have been equalized, but I disagree. After testing with one of my guild mates; he on a Tiger, me on my Hyrkanian Horse....he still outstrips me in speed. Not sure how this works but I'm still not buying into the speed equalization of the mounts as yet. It's still nice though to be able to sprint much longer distances without worrying about combo stam issues. For that I'm pretty thankful.

Known issues to date:

Well, the patch overall was fairly smooth. BUT! there are some standing issues in game that have made serious play very difficult:

- Rubber banding and mini lag spikes in open world. Irritating but not game breaking. Still, combos are being missed or skipped. Makes it more of an annoyance.

- Lag spikes in Raids/instances: This is still infuriating. Patience has been our watchword, but it can be very very annoying. This has slowed out timing in combat seriously and has made it so when we should have won a fight, we lost it due to raid wide lag. It has also kicked some people out of the game.

- Adds bugged in W2: This was specific to our guild and not necessarily Server wide, but on 3 attempts at Suruah, 1 dusk fiend per run was bugged and would not die. Not a game breaker as it was frozen, but still an issue. Incubus/Succubus also had an odd bug. They wouldn't walk to each other on the regular proc. Instead at random interval, Inccy would literally RUN to Succi so it was a crazy race to get him back into his side of the room. Didn't break the encounter as we thought fast on our feet, but it was very annoying.

- Trade house not sending bought items. Now THIS is a real pisser. It is a server wide issue so be warned till a hotfix comes into play. Players attempting to collect items they bought from the Trader are not showing up in their mail at all. I think this is a by product of the game mail system changes that were put into effect so that if you mailed someone an item, it doesn't leave your inventory till they pick it up. Anyways, on one of my lowbie toons, I spent 6 gold for upgrades and have yet to see either the items or money returned. I dropped my Stonerune UI to see if that would change it and nope, it does not. GM said to repetition in a few hours if the items do not show up.

If you see any further issues you might want to add in, please post here. I's like to make a collection to send it up to FC to see what they can do about it.

Anyways, even with the issues which will prolly get fixed in the next week or so, I hope to see ya all out in Hyboria, slashing and hacking your way to glory!