Keep improvements

Heh, tricked you all!

Instead of any of the previously talked about topics I am going to talk about Keeps and how I feel they could be improved. Unfortunately I didn't go to bed till about 5am so...I may ramble.

Okay so as we all know keeps and as an extension Fortresses leave a lot to be desired, although I have no problems with leaving Fortresses as a vanilla zerg versus zerg objective. Please ...just a little more room to move around, a little less lag and possibly make it a little more obvious to everyone involved that unless you have wards your gonna take a bajillion damage?

Anyway, keeps.

Back when I played Tabula Rasa I was most disapointed by the keeps system, I honestly thought it was going to be more dynamic than it was, but instead it turned out that if you owned something it was yours and every 20 mins or so bugs attacked it.

Sigh. On the plus side though the walls were a lot lower, everyone had ranged weapons and just generally more went on, even though it was only an NPC attack.

I think this needs to be the case here, all of the attackers need to be able to get involved with something. Ranged are fine, they can blast away at the people on the floor, but melee gets the shaft unless the enemy gets reinforcements and the postern door needs defending or the oil is down and the door can be attacked.

My solution, make the whole thing more interactive, actually allow people to break through into the keep before the main door is down. An example would be reikland from the Chaos side.

At the south keep there is a crypt that you can actually enter and run around in, what if the door to it was locked shut and required some sort of dark blessing to open it.

Anyway, you could get the dark blessing from one of the centre BOs, a friendly zealot would appear at the Reikwatch BO when you took it saying something like, I was working on a ritual when order attacked and I hid. Anyway this zealot invites 6 people to join the ritual and they all end up with the buff, the zealot then dies permanently until the BO is next captured.

All well and good you might say? But why would I want to open the crypt gates? Well here's why at Scwenderhalle manor, the southern BO, inside the house and guarded by the sergeant, only openable by people not in combat is a secret passage that will take you into the crypt inside the outer walls. Anyone with the buff can now be inside the castle walls and run around.

Why not just implement the bypass defences that allows melee DPS to enter keeps? cause this is more fun and why would people even want to do this?

Well inside the keep would be a minor objective at the gatehouse where you could actually spend 5 uninterupted seconds opening the door from the inside, meaning that the defender (order in this case) needs to pay attention to whats going on.

This is intentionally powerful because it punishes the keep defender who cant also defend the outlying BOs. Even if they just defended one of the two.

You could have all sorts of similar things everywhere and tie in BOs as an important part of keep defence.

But why defend keeps rather than just heading off you might ask? Well here is the answer, firstly defenders should get a PQ where if they kill 100 attackers or so a couple of golden loot bags are thrown their way.

I also think that there needs to be a bigger bonus for holding onto a zone once you have it. Because with keeps and BOs being static VPs that means that once you have captured a keep there is no incentive to keep it because you know if you really want to lock the zone you just need to go get the keeps back.

My idea is that keeps are initially worth ZERO victory points but for every hour you hold them they add some up to like 110% of their original worth over 3 hours. I think this would make people more likely to defend them.

Just generally I think any and all of these changes would make the game more fun.

Just Kidding

Actually I wanted to talk to you guys about well actually I have two subjects I want to talk about and I honestly can't pick the one I want to do the most.

Gear Grind or my current spec...

Hmm be right back lemme go roll a dice or something.

I flipped a coin, it landed on its side.

I'll spend some time writing them up, also I'm on my laptop at the moment and it's really bloody inconvenient for getting screenshots when the game isn't installed on a computer I can use soooo.

I'll do the framework and watch this space for an exciting guide on what to do with a 1HD axe that has 55.1DPS and also I will tell you where to go...to get the gear you need to get the gear you need (this may be a bit of a rant, but its my blog and thats allowed)

Anyway, this post (and I guess the one before too) were really just to wish you guys a happy holiday and let you know I didn't die of explosive bowel haemohroids as a vicious rumor may have said.

I've Been Gone...

Hey guys, miss me?

I was going to make excuses about it being the holidays and me being busy and yadda yadda yadda, but to be honest I was at my computer most of the time I wasn't posting I just couldn't think of anything to write about. So I kinda didn't.

I'm now stuck with family over christmas and boredom being the single greatest motivator in life apparently, I have decided to write something.

Something.

Man I'm so glad that I got the whole blog post for today thing done.

Where have all the Bright Wizards gone?

You remember, not too long ago you destuction folks the over abundance of Bright Wizards?

Do you fondly remember the days where you were being burnt to a crisp in under 6 seconds?

What happened?

Well here's the thing, the bright wizards said they were all okay, everyone else disagreed and they got a slight nerf. Don't get me wrong they still dish out sick damage when a good player is using them and they have a healer. So now instead of 6 Bright Wizards a scenario we have a slightly more manageable 3 or 4.

What happened to the rest? Well here's my theory. KNoBS (or KotBS if you wanna be Mythically correct). That's right, the old Bright Wizards are mostly, not all, the type of person that sits down, figures out the flavour of the month class and rolls it. My theory is that KotBS is the new Bright Wizard, cause I'm starting to see more and more in T4 and they kick mine and any other melees ass without doing a damn thing. Reflected damage for the win.

I don't begrudge this and I realise its a new class and it will be balanced, why? Because Mythic unlike a few other companies I could name tries to balance all the other classes. Barring KotBS abd Grass is always greener syndrome. I think that the games class balance if actually very very good.

As a marauder I could probably do with a slight nerf to be honest, especially in the area of Terrible Embrace, 10 second cooldown? (but shh don't tell mythic that)

Healers on the whole lack damage, which is a pain when they are trying to solo as there are a lot of reports of lack of enough damage to burn down targets fast enough. Stick them with a DPS though and the two of them will go faster than double the speed the solo DPS would have gone.

My honest opinion is that the two sides are pretty equal, with Destro saying Order is more powerful and vice-versa. They are really rather different beats in some ways which I love and I think a big bonus over WoW where the two sides were esentially mirrors of each other.

I would say that Destro was slightly more organised, tactics wise two times out of three than order and I think this makes a big difference. But on the other hand Order seem to have a hell of a lot more crowd control than destro which means that we need the brains.

The game is suffering slightly from the lack of MDPS choices meaning that RDPS are more proliferant that MDPS or even tanks and they have a hard time of closing the gap, specially with the CC on both sides.

These really are just a rambling lot of thoughts on class balance at this time, take it or leave it but I would be interested to know your opinions on it.

Here Comes The Zerg

"Mass tactics", "Safety in numbers" or "This is just how oRvR is, right?" These are just a few this it is called, whatever you call it it is the tactic of massing together an army of a warband or two worth of people and using it to roll around the oRvR countryside in game smashing everything in its path under its wheels. Drawing more and more to it mass like moths to a flame.

Why do people mass together like this? All rushing around from one point to another trying to waste as little time as possible anywhere? Is it to find the enemy and put them into the grinder at the from of this behemoth? No.

And you may have guessed by now, that I am not talking about those organised zergs that do what a single overlord and master tells them. Instead I'm talking about the type of zerg that gives everyone their own ability to freely come and go and do as they please as long as they don't piss off any of their teammates too much.

So what are the attractions of the zerg? Well for one thing it means your very, very unlikely to get ganked. Safety in numbers. Secondly and undeniably, running blindly from Battle Objective to Battle Objective to Keep is a good way of getting Renown Rank and also the new oRvR influence. Any order you get will get to will be mown down and pushing forth the enemy infront of you, hacking at their knees and hearing the lamentations of their women without casualty one to yourself is fun. For a while.

After that, well it becomes more of a boost, you remember when you wanted to hit level 18 quickly so you got a level God-only-knows-what to come and boost you through and all the mobs were 7 levels ahead of you you knew if you hit one you would die? So you just followed this guy around mindlessly. Its a bit like that, I spent an hour at one point never leaving my horse.

Even the guys that are only doing it for loot are getting stiffed, apparently due to whatever system keeps are using the same people keep getting the gold bags, one guy I know has 6 in his inventory cause he has all he wants from them and he is hoping the contents might change at a later date. Someone else has the complaint that the WB leaders are lazy and they are missing out on loot due to everyone rolling need on items they want but can't use. Warband leaders won't kick them or enable Need on Use so the nice blue shoulder piece that is 2 times better for your Marauder? That just went to the shaman over there.

The thing is, that it isn't like there is a choice. You either zerg or your out of oRvR. Small groups, six to twelve man stuff have done a little here and there before suddenly the zerg shows up, takes over the keep you've been working the last ten minutes and claims all the loot bags for themselves.

If they aren't currently at a point and a small group is skirmishing further up the road at a point that is in the zergs crosshairs but they haven't gotten to yet cause they are still taking the keep down the road for example you will be called on it. People in the zerg feel that any BO out there belongs to THEM and only THEM, if you take what is there's then you are a thief and deserve to be blacklisted. It happens folks, if you aren't one of them then you are preventing them getting what they want.

So basically, the zerg is a faceless mass, that doesn't want anyone else interfering with THEIR game, are probably not having too much fun in their full WBs and bitch at anyone that tries to.

I sometimes wonder if the only people that get anything out of it are the people in /2 posting sarcastic remarks at the sheer idiocy of it all.

No Update

This is an update to tell you that today there is no update.

Instead I dinged 40 and you get a picture of a cute tapir.

Ch22

I hit Chaos Ch22 Reikland last night to finish off some quests, and up till now the PvE, barring some stupid mistakes or the odd badly timed wandering mob has been EZ mode.

Like I said, I hit Ch22 and got my ass handed to me, again, and again, and again. The mobs patrol, are R41, they all seem to be linked and it's a 15 minute ride back if you die! Along the road of doom! I felt like I had been repetedly analy violated.

Seriously it was like banging your head against a brick wall.

On the other hand, I did get my new axe, the Slasher, after about three and a half hours and it is awesome and I love it to bits, but only after I got a guildy to come help me out. (With the getting, not the loving!)

Annihilation Epic quest for a decent weapon ladies and gentlemens!