Herald of Xotli: PvP after the 2.2 patch

Greetings everyone.
I've been slacking a bit on this blog lately (Slith will enjoy this statement) essentially because I wanted to test out the PvE side of life with my alternate toons and to see how much smoother was the faction progression.
But I've also invested some time in PvP with my HoX trying to draw a line and compare how much the gameplay on the overall changed, and for good from my point of view.

I've been in some minigames mostly Hallowed Vaults and Lost Temple with my beloved HoX and I have to admit I had a lot of fun. Yesterday I ended up in a minigame full of rogues (melee ones) and I was already feeling the pain, my last memory of minigames with this setup was limited to a Stun - Dead - Ress behaviour without any real chance to do something concrete, beside rare exceptions when I managed to found a small hole to unleash the flames of Xotli.
It was the heaven of the CC-lock and of the huge damage spikes from sins, it was really hard for an HoX to survive enough to call it fun regardless of the deaths, in fact spending 10 minutes just clicking on the "Resurrect" button can hardly be defined as fun or challengin, it's rather frustrating and annoying.

Back on the trial, I was so expecting another devastating experience, but I came out from that mini with a big surprise. I've been able to move, without being thrown all over the place and raped by the first shade that approached me, mostly due to the new CC mechanics, I was able to move around and I was able to time correctly my HFB to interrupt dangerous moves from my enemies which could have been the cause of my death.

Admittedly after a month of non-pvp activity my result was not so shining, but again I think that once I'll remove some rust from my wheels it will be even more fun.
You know, for the first time in a minigame against sins and barbarians I've been able not only to play, but also to be a real support for my group, carrying the flag, protecting the healer (they don't need it so often and being dead does not help when they really need) or simply slowing down those who were chasing at our flag carrier.

Let me be clear, if caught in the wrong place and affected by a CC the HoX will still die in pain, and it is still most susceptible to it than most other classes, but the situation really changed and even though I still believe the HoX suffers from a weaker base than others in the game, its status has been improved indirectly by the new CC mechanics and received a small direct boost from the changes at HFB.

I'm sticking around with a Poss/Gen build still which is highly reccomended for a "pew-pew" tactic, but I'm slowly building the idea to develope a new kind of hybrid build removing some points from the general to add them in the Avatar Tree.

It's all under test though I don't expect it to work properly nor to convince me to switch to it anytime soon :)


Generally speaking about AoC apparently the new zones that will be released in game are Turan and another Arashadir-something (can't recall the exact name), rumors confirmed by the "Search for Zone" feature in game which shows Turan in the list, also Silirrion said on Twitter that we should expect something on the level of announcement in this week or next week when the 3 years of AoC Birthday will fall (a lot of speculation about the date though so I'm officially confused).

Also there will be soon enough new content to test on the Test Live server as well as the announced set up of the Blood&Glory ruleset which should be released during the summer.

Busy times are ahead indeed, let's just see what the future will bring :)

Stay tuned!

Arcalimon