Last night, I acquired a full set of named armor for one of my characters. Of course, it was on my one greenskin, Gitsmacka the Choppa. He now proudly displays his new title: "The Obliterator". It's been kind of a circuitous trip getting him to this set, so I'll fill you in on the backstory.

Several weeks ago I read over Gaarawarr's Armor Set Guide and it inspired me. I'd already missed out on the Decimator set on my choppa, so I decided to take the time to try acquiring at least a couple of the sets that I could in T2 while I was there. Most critical was the Obliterator set, as once you get past R21, there's really no hope of getting the chest piece or the boots for that set. It's tough to win a Keep PQ loot bag as a chicken, I would expect.

So, I hit R17 on Gitsmacka and decided to try to collect as many of the sets as I could before ranking out of T2. I ran around and collected all the quests I needed for the Tracker's set. Then began a campaign of nothing but RvR to try winning the Obliterator chest piece and getting the Obliterator boots to drop. This also played into the Tracker's set, because I needed to kill 20 Witch Hunters, Ironbreakers, and Swordmasters each. I'd totally forgotten about the Keeper's set, and wasn't worried about the Havoc set, since I could get that after R21 anyway. And RvRing is a slow way to rank up, so it was the best bet to keep me in T2 as long as possible and increase chances of getting Obliterator.

It turned out that the RvR kills were slow going. I expected that to be the fastest part of this. Tougher would be getting groups together to help me kill the heroes for the second parts of the Havoc quest chains. But pretty quickly I scored in the top three in a keep siege, and obtained my Obliterator Tuff Chest. In another session, I took two keeps, and won two more Tuff Chests. I didn't even claim them from the bags while I was still in the warband out of embarassment. So I had 3 Tuff Chests in my bags, and I couldn't even wear them yet. Durr.

There I stood for some time. My kills were slow going, not even getting ten for each of the classes I needed. (Where are the T2 Swordmasters on Ironfist? They're like some kind of lost tribe.) Until last night.

I logged in and found myself in the Ostland warcamp. Since I've been alt hopping lately, it's always kind of a suprise where I'll be when I log in. I queued up for some scens and waited. Then the announcement came that Mandred's Hold was under attack by Order. Hey, there could be some good kills there. Maybe bring down some Witch Hunters. So I headed out and scoped out the keep to see if it was just a random spark. Nope, I could see several Order out front, and a ram. They were serious. It just so happened that I had some oil on me. Even though I was alone, the oil could make things fun, and while I might not save the keep, I could rack up some kills.

Through the postern and up to the landing I ran, and found they'd already taken out the oil. But I didn't think they'd spotted me, so I waited. Sure enough, in short order the Oil spawned again, and I jumped on it and rained boiling enmity down on them. I don't think they even noticed the first dump of oil. The second dump killed two or three of them, and then they noticed, heh. The third dump aced two more, and then the Bright Wizard started whacking on the oil, and I was taking some serious AoE damage. I ran off for a second to stabilize myself, and then jumped in to dump more oil. I died at that point, but I did get some more oil off and killed one more of them. So, I got five or six solo kills. I was happy to have the renown to myself.

I respawned and booked it back to Mandred's to dump more oil on them, but unfortunately, they were already in the keep. I got upstairs losing about half my health, and laden with a BW DoT. Hmm. But my appearance had them wary, so they didn't charge up to the pad. When they did, the same BW killed me again as I harrassed them. It was then that I announced on region chat that Mandred's was about to go down.

When I spawned again and ran out, I was happy to see that there were four other Destro on the way, too. No healers, though. Despite that, we were able to get into the keep and begin the chaos, which can be all it takes to get a keep siege to crumble apart. Soon, we had torn them to shreds, leaving a pile of digital corpses littering the balcony. They had only had about one party worth taking the keep, so we were about evenly matched human groups. I racked up a couple more kills, including the BW that had taken me down twice. (Thanks, Dammaz Kron). Plus, I'd gotten a couple Witch Hunter and Ironbreaker kills for my quests.

Still not enough renown to don my Tuff Chest though. One of the keep defenders turned out to be in my guild, so we put together a team for scenarios since we were all fired up about our recent keep defense. After a wait long enough to make me worry there would be no scens at all, Mourkain Temple popped. It was a typical scen, with Destro keeping Order on their heels most of it. The match was still close, though, with the artifact going back and forth. But then it happened. Obliterator Stompas popped up. It goes without saying that I 'needed' on that one. Usually there's a long wait as more people slowly roll on it. But somehow, I must have been the last one, and almost as soon as I rolled, my chat box told me I'd gotten them.

It took one more scen to get my renown rank, but by then, I was able to run out to Mandred's and buy the Obliterator Punchas. In one fell swoop I changed from a clown garbed in motley to a warrior in a coordinated outfit. (Far better than a war wizard outfit.) Turns out, the Obliterator set is by far the best of the four. I'll still try to get the others though, for the titles. I need 3-5 more kills of each class to get there for Tracker's, though.

(And yes, I know that this had nothing to to with the Druchii, but it was timely. You can garnish my wages.)

--Anromir