Warhammer Online events seem to be following something of a sine wave of grind. The first, Witching Night, was towards the grind-y peak, needing a fair bit of farming to fill the influence bar up. The second, Heavy Metal, involved minimal grind, a few rounds of the Reikland Factory scenario being sufficient for most of its tasks, then we ramped back up to max-o-grind for Keg End, which involved some fun /boast-ing and /toast-ing, but also vast swathes of event-mob-slaughtering if you wanted to fill the bar right up. The current event, Night of Murder, plunges back towards the “yes, we have no grind” end of the scale; within the space of a couple of scenarios and some light open-RvR I’d filled two-thirds of the influence bar. A couple of the tasks are going to be slightly problematic, though, primarily killing ten Keep Lords. Ten? I like a keep siege now and again, but either it’s a bloody war of attrition in the face of enemy heavy weapons and tank walls, in which case it’s really quite time consuming and there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed, or a pretty tedious affair if the enemy aren’t defending (attack door, attack door, attack door, run through door, attack door, attack door, attack door, run through door, attack keep lord, ???, profit!) Either way, it’s not really something I’m desperate to do several times a night. Still, another round or two of the “kill five marked players” quest should be enough to round out the influence bar for the jewellery reward, so I’ll only need to finish off the keep lords for the “Master Assassin” title.

Speaking of rewards, their usefulness is fortunately out of phase with the grind wave; final influence reward for Witching Night: a stat-less mask. Heavy Metal: a stat-ful cloak, that also looks pretty spiffy (plus Knight/Blackguard early unlock). Keg End: a tankard, with a limited number of uses to teleport to a pub in Altdorf (teleporting to a pub’s always good, but it’s a similar effect to a 30 copper guild recall scroll). Night of Murder: a stat-ful piece of jewellery in a choice of four flavours (though I’m slightly annoyed, as two of the pieces give a 5% gold bonus that isn’t much use, what with their being very little to actually spend gold on, and two give a 5% renown boost that would be quite nice; as a Bright Wizard I’m trying to stack +Int for extra damage, and the only gem with +Int is one of the gold-boosting ones. Hrm. Guess I’ll just pick one of the others, as plenty of other stuff boosts Int.)

I believe the next event is due to be “Bitter Rivals”, building up to the introduction of the Slayer and Choppa, and if my theory holds and the Wave of Grind maintains its shape we’re heading for Grindcon Alpha. Still, assuming one of the final rewards is the early unlock of the new classes, at least that might spread the forthcoming transformation of 74.96% of the population of WAR into melee DPS over a couple of weeks instead of it happening overnight…