Although my impressions of Warhammer Online are positive overall, I’m surprised by some of the depth that turns up at times. Overall, I think the game is fun, but a bit easy. The developers continue to surprise me - at first it was Tome Tactics, and now it’s Lairs.
Alendale and I hooked up with the Templars guild last night, after a few hours of Bastion Stairs and trying to take a keep, we went off seeking new advernture by visiting Lairs. From the Hammerwiki:
A lair is a type of secret area in the Warhammer Online world. It could possibly be a cave, a dungeon, a mountaintop; somewhere in the zone that is far off the beaten path, and generally disregarded. What makes lairs special, is that there are no quests or directions leading you there, so they are stumbled upon by explorers who enjoy seeing every nook and cranny of the world. Lairs generally, even when discovered, require the player to solve a puzzle or figure out some indirect way of obtaining access to the lair - they also usually contain a powerful boss monster who is many times more powerful than is appropriate for the zone they are in (with a few exceptions of weaker boss monsters).
There appears to be a Lair in each store, manned by at least one level 40 Hero (who also drops a nice piece of blue loot). Getting to each one is the trick - they’re hidden away in the mountains or down a river, and as mentioned above involve a puzzle. Two of the ones we visited were jumping puzzles - it was almost like some weird Super Mario experience you’d expect in a Nintendo game. Far more amusing was watching other members of the group trying to do the jumps. (I gave up on the jumping tree puzzle in Norsca, and Al did it for me after much swearing on my part).
Frostshard Prison, one of the few Lairs not named Lair of xxx, was an interesting one, with up to eight Heros. Spawn times are unknown, but we were able to down three of the mobs, who, either by chance or design, all dropped loot only usable by Dwarves.
The night was a blast, and it wasn’t just discovering the puzzle and Hero of each Lair - hanging with Templars was fun. A casual guild of adults, we spent the night making fun of each other in Ventrilo trying to navigate the jump puzzles to discussing old games. Overall, a good bunch of folks.
Kudos to Mythic - tucking these away in each zone with a well thought out plan of how the players would have to get to each one (let alone find it) is quite the pleasant surpise in the game. It was’s a nice touch and breaks up some of the monotony of the game.
Here is a screenshot of one of the mobs, the hydra, in Migliod’s Menagerie: